Judge should be unfriended

If you're familiar at all with Facebook, you know there's a feature where you can click a button and "like" something.

You could "like" the most innocuous things: a posted comment, a store, a company, a product, a cause, a contest, a food, a TV channel, etc.

You could "like" the idea that Jon Stewart host a presidential debate, or Jane Austen memorabilia, or the Mid-Atlantic Chevy Girls, whoever they might be.

Sounds harmless enough, right?

Except now, if you "like" something or somebody your boss doesn't, you could get fired.

This is the latest revelation in a running legal battle between Hampton Sheriff B.J. Roberts and six people who claim he fired them for supporting a political rival when he ran for re-election in 2009.

It seems one of those employees had "liked" the Facebook page of Roberts' opponent, Jim Adams.

While courts have ruled elsewhere that an actual message posted on Facebook is constitutionally protected speech, U.S. District Judge Raymond Jackson has ruled that clicking the "like" button is not.

This is, to put it kindly, a baffling legal decision.

Or, to put it bluntly, Judge Jackson must have left his brain in his other robe that day.

There are two issues here: A judge who is alarmingly ignorant on what constitutes speech, and a sheriff who got rid of employees for using it.

"The court will not attempt to infer the actual content of (the employee's) post from one click of a button on Adams' Facebook page," Jackson wrote.

First, seriously? "Liking" something is ambiguous?

And second, "speech" doesn't have to be uttered verbally. It could be something as symbolic as a thumb's up — which courts have already ruled is constitutionally protected speech.

Not incoincidentally, the "like" button on Facebook is designated by a thumb's up icon. (Has Jackson ever seen a Facebook page?)

By the judge's reasoning, then, if the employee had posted a written message on Adams' Facebook page — e.g., "I like Adams" — the First Amendment would have protected the employee's right to free speech. But clicking the word "like" next to a thumb's up icon is somehow dissimilar enough to cost a man his job.

And let's look at that job, and the five others that were lost — four were deputies, and two were administrative staffers. All were gone within a month after the election, and claim their firings violated their constitutional rights to free expression and political association.

Roberts said those employees served at his will by state law, and can be fired for any reason. After all, Virginia is a "right to work" state, which essentially means "the right to be fired without cause" state.

Roberts claims he didn't even know the employees had backed his opponent.

Back in January, the sheriff's attorney argued that deputies acting as "sworn law enforcement officers" don't have First Amendment rights while on duty — raising the question of whether deputies who don't attend law enforcement training or have the authority to make arrests are sworn law enforcement officers.

Also that month, Judge Jackson threw out the case a week before trial was to begin. He didn't issue his formal opinion — including his startling interpretation of the "like" button — till April 24.

More recently, the sheriff claims he dismissed some deputies because he wants to replace them with sworn officers (e.g., employees legally and definitively stripped of their First Amendment rights). He says he fired others for their poor job performance or, according to one news report, because their actions "hindered the harmony and efficiency of the office."

We have other local sheriffs overstepping their authority, getting tyrannical and mean-spirited, stripping and body-cavity searching workers without probable cause, getting investigated by the State Police, getting hit with criminal charges, etc. Now we have one working diligently to muzzle his own people.

You'd hope a sheriff — a constitutional officer — would be a better champion of constitutional rights.